6 ms·

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

by xyzzy4 9y ago

jfoster 9y ago
Driving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income. (likely at somewhat less than 100% efficiency, but who cares because of the massive scale?) The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; replacing car ownership. The unit profits will decrease as part of this effort, but the opportunity is again huge. How will you monetise laundry folding automation? At best you can replace just some of the people at all the commercial laundries and turn that into profit, but many laundries may hire one person who does everything. For home use you could sell a machine, but how much would you need to charge for it for that to equal recurring revenue from autonomous vehicles and how much are people willing to pay for a laundry robot? (even robotic vacuums are still quite niche despite probably being more convenient and costing less than LaundryBot)
- zghst 9y ago
  Laundry bot would make no money, I think. People are happy to do this task on their own or via a maid.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Laundry bot would definitely make money, tons of it. Robo maid is like numero uno on things people have historically wished robots would do in the future
    - veidr 9y ago
      Yep, I paid around $2000 for a nice Hitachi drum-type washer-dryer machine last year. I would certainly, without any hesitation whatsoever, have been willing to pay $5000 or even a bit more for one that, instead of just washing and drying all our clothes, took a pile of dirty clothes as input and output a few stacks of washed, dried, folded, and sorted clothes. Anybody with children would want this; those who also have sufficient money would buy it.
      - mrfusion 9y ago
        It would be simpler to invent wrinkle free clothes and convince your wife clothes don't need to be sorted.
    - zghst 9y ago
      Before the invention of modern washing and drying machines, sure. But today many people in big cities don't even have an washer and dryer in their home or may not have one in the building, this problem spans many different use cases of how people consume the service. I'd consider asking things like: * Is the barrier higher and value lower because they have laundry in their unit or does the value increase marginally because they have in the building, or is it more lucrative because they don't have laundry at all? * And does a solution scale easily across these different use cases? * The ability to provide continuity on even a pure software scale makes this a particularly pricey arena to enter because a person is required to fulfill this service. To find ways to make this economical, we'd have to consider co-opting existing behaviors or economic patterns. Are there _multiple_ existing patterns that we can enhance?
- ams6110 9y ago
  > replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income That's not how it works, because your competitors will undercut you. Then you will undercut them, and continue the race to the bottom until the natural price is reached.
  - jfoster 9y ago
    The efficiency will certainly be a lot less than 100%, and it does seem likely that at least two companies might bring the tech to market within a couple of years of each other. I think whatever the starting price point is, there will probably be so much of a demand/supply gap that the initial price point will hold for a number of years.
babyrainbow 9y ago
People are downvoting you. But I think this is a really good point...
- chc 9y ago
  It isn't, though. The two tasks aren't very similar. It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons, but nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry."
  - babyrainbow 9y ago
    > The two tasks aren't very similar.. Care to elaborate? Is folding laundry harder than driving? Doesn't both involve following visual cues and making corrections continuously based on that... >It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons And your comment can be seen as a pithy attack on criticism of something you are overly enthusiastic about "for other reasons"... >nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry." That is not the point. Point is to evaluating how capable the current AI/visual processing technology is. And why not test advancement in AI with something much safer, like folding laundry? Instead of putting it in a car that can actually kill people... It is a good point.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      AI isn't a magic black box which one just plugs into stuff. There's some core mechanisms, but those are already well tried in many other applications. The hard part is developing a specific AI for driving. Also, self-driving cars are not new, they're being developed for over thirty years, and they've logged millions of miles, many in public streets. The problems remaining will be in edge cases, and you definitively can't use your "folding AI" to test for that.
- tnecniv 9y ago
  No it isn't. Modeling how a robot interacts with cloth is actually quite difficult dynamically. Much more difficult than how a car operates.
zghst 9y ago
The car is a legitimate next step with AI, computers and sensors are already integrated and have been doing basic functions like parking, whereas computers are not integrated into manual laundry task, this market has decided computers are not economical or profitable to integrate into the chain.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  Laundry seems like more of a mechanics problem. I'm sure it's doable, maybe not particularly cheaply/compactly though
ewrcoffee 9y ago
but it could https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo
- fest 9y ago
  If I understand it right, it takes this robot ~ 90 minutes to fold 5 towels.

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

by xyzzy4 9y ago

If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.

Driving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income. (likely at somewhat less than 100% efficiency, but who cares because of the massive scale?) The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; replacing car ownership. The unit profits will decrease as part of this effort, but the opportunity is again huge. How will you monetise laundry folding automation? At best you can replace just some of the people at all the commercial laundries and turn that into profit, but many laundries may hire one person who does everything. For home use you could sell a machine, but how much would you need to charge for it for that to equal recurring revenue from autonomous vehicles and how much are people willing to pay for a laundry robot? (even robotic vacuums are still quite niche despite probably being more convenient and costing less than LaundryBot)

zghst 9y ago
Laundry bot would make no money, I think. People are happy to do this task on their own or via a maid.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  Laundry bot would definitely make money, tons of it. Robo maid is like numero uno on things people have historically wished robots would do in the future
  - veidr 9y ago
    Yep, I paid around $2000 for a nice Hitachi drum-type washer-dryer machine last year. I would certainly, without any hesitation whatsoever, have been willing to pay $5000 or even a bit more for one that, instead of just washing and drying all our clothes, took a pile of dirty clothes as input and output a few stacks of washed, dried, folded, and sorted clothes. Anybody with children would want this; those who also have sufficient money would buy it.
    - mrfusion 9y ago
      It would be simpler to invent wrinkle free clothes and convince your wife clothes don't need to be sorted.
  - zghst 9y ago
    Before the invention of modern washing and drying machines, sure. But today many people in big cities don't even have an washer and dryer in their home or may not have one in the building, this problem spans many different use cases of how people consume the service. I'd consider asking things like: * Is the barrier higher and value lower because they have laundry in their unit or does the value increase marginally because they have in the building, or is it more lucrative because they don't have laundry at all? * And does a solution scale easily across these different use cases? * The ability to provide continuity on even a pure software scale makes this a particularly pricey arena to enter because a person is required to fulfill this service. To find ways to make this economical, we'd have to consider co-opting existing behaviors or economic patterns. Are there _multiple_ existing patterns that we can enhance?
ams6110 9y ago
> replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income That's not how it works, because your competitors will undercut you. Then you will undercut them, and continue the race to the bottom until the natural price is reached.
- jfoster 9y ago
  The efficiency will certainly be a lot less than 100%, and it does seem likely that at least two companies might bring the tech to market within a couple of years of each other. I think whatever the starting price point is, there will probably be so much of a demand/supply gap that the initial price point will hold for a number of years.

babyrainbow 9y ago

People are downvoting you. But I think this is a really good point...

chc 9y ago
It isn't, though. The two tasks aren't very similar. It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons, but nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry."
- babyrainbow 9y ago
  > The two tasks aren't very similar.. Care to elaborate? Is folding laundry harder than driving? Doesn't both involve following visual cues and making corrections continuously based on that... >It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons And your comment can be seen as a pithy attack on criticism of something you are overly enthusiastic about "for other reasons"... >nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry." That is not the point. Point is to evaluating how capable the current AI/visual processing technology is. And why not test advancement in AI with something much safer, like folding laundry? Instead of putting it in a car that can actually kill people... It is a good point.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    AI isn't a magic black box which one just plugs into stuff. There's some core mechanisms, but those are already well tried in many other applications. The hard part is developing a specific AI for driving. Also, self-driving cars are not new, they're being developed for over thirty years, and they've logged millions of miles, many in public streets. The problems remaining will be in edge cases, and you definitively can't use your "folding AI" to test for that.
tnecniv 9y ago
No it isn't. Modeling how a robot interacts with cloth is actually quite difficult dynamically. Much more difficult than how a car operates.

zghst 9y ago

The car is a legitimate next step with AI, computers and sensors are already integrated and have been doing basic functions like parking, whereas computers are not integrated into manual laundry task, this market has decided computers are not economical or profitable to integrate into the chain.

bpicolo 9y ago
Laundry seems like more of a mechanics problem. I'm sure it's doable, maybe not particularly cheaply/compactly though

ewrcoffee 9y ago

but it could https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo

fest 9y ago
If I understand it right, it takes this robot ~ 90 minutes to fold 5 towels.